52
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 21, 2013
lying, or silent. As he looks away, he
laughs.
At the time he was betting on an art-
ist s life, Walsh had embarked on an even
more quixotic project: building a private
art museum in Tasmania dedicated to sex
and death. The Museum of Old and New
Art (MONA) opened in January, 2011, and
was immediately welcomed by some as a
new beginning for museums and derided
by others as the end of art.
Walsh wanted his visitors to ascend to
the museum from the water, as the ancient
Greeks did to their temples. But at first
sight from the Derwent River---from which
most museumgoers approach by ferry
from downtown Hobart, the capital---
MONA looms above like a post-apocalyp-
tic fortress, waffled-concrete walls inter-
secting with great trapezoidal battlements
clad in rusting steel. Set on a small penin-
sula, the four-story complex is almost twice
the size of New York s Guggenheim.
Tasmanians are admitted to the mu-
seum free of charge and everyone else pays
an entrance fee. Visitors descend by a
large spiral staircase or a cylindrical glass
elevator at its center, to cavernous deep
passageways cut through Triassic sand-
stone, at the juncture of which there is a
bar. Beyond the desultory drinkers is mys-
terious night. Elsewhere in the crepuscu-
lar light there hides a library, a cinema,
various performance spaces, and three lev-
els of galleries, all discrete and different.
Some of the walls are gilded. One gallery
is lined with bloodred velvet. Another
room is flooded with water that s dyed
black, which you cross on stepping stones
to an island holding two large and identi-
cal cabinets, one containing an Egyptian
sarcophagus, the other a digital animation
of CAT scans which unveils layers of the
sarcophagus until it reveals the bones of its
mummy.
At this point, MONA begins to feel like
a mashup of the lost city of Petra and a
late night out in Berlin. Everything about
it is disorienting and yet somehow famil-
iar, from the high-tech tropes, the low-
culture babble, the black humor about so
much that is so serious, the attention to
aesthetics in a museum unsure if beauty
exists or, if it does, if it matters.
Designed like a Borgesian labyrinth, lit
like a night club, MONA, since it opened
on a remote island, with a population of
five hundred thousand, has attracted
more than seven hundred thousand peo-
ple. Visitors came first from Tasmania,
then from Australia, and now, increas-
ingly, from the world---a growing caravan
of celebrities, art lovers, aficionados, camp
followers, and the curious. In less than
two years, MONA has become Tasmania s
foremost tourist attraction and a signi-
ficant driver of its languishing economy.
Lonely Planet listed Hobart as one of the
world s top ten cities to visit in 2013,
largely because of MONA.
Walsh is explicit about what his mu-
seum is not: it s not a rich man gratefully
giving back to his community. It s not an
attempt at immortality, as he frankly ad-
mits that his collection may be deemed
worthless in another decade. It is a the-
atre of strange enchantments: from a wall
of a hundred and fifty-one sculptures of
women s vaginas to racks of rotting cow
carcasses; a waterfall, the droplets of
which form words from the most-
Googled headlines of the day; the re-
mains of a suicide bomber cast in choco-
late; a grossly fattened red Porsche; a
lavatory in which, through a system of
mirrors and binoculars, you can view your
own anus; X-ray images of rats carrying
crucifixes; a library of blank books; cune-
iform tablets; and stone blocks from the
Hiroshima railway station, which was de-
stroyed in the atom bombing. Its most
loathed exhibit is also one of its most
popular: Wim Delvoye s "Cloaca Profes-
sional," a large, reeking machine that rep-
licates the human digestive system, turn-
ing food into feces, which it excretes
daily.
Walsh calls MONA a secular temple
and a subversive adult Disneyland. If some
of his early ideas for exhibits---a cremato-
rium and an abattoir that were view-
able---remain unrealized, MONA still goes
somewhere beyond the frontiers of taste
into the badlands of emotion. It has been
derided as a museum for the YouTube
generation, a new Valley of the Kings, an
underground inverted pyramid, an ego-
seum, the future, the past, an un-museum,
and---one feels, hurtfully for Walsh---
conventional. Mostly, people have loved
it. Gary Tinterow, a former Met curator
and now the director of the Museum of
Fine Arts in Houston, described MONA as
"one of the most fascinating and satisfying
experiences I have ever had in a museum."
John Kaldor, a member of the Interna-
tional Committee of New York s Mu-
seum of Modern Art, said he believes
that "MONA has been a watershed in the
way that art is understood by the general
public."
At MONA s center is the largest mod-
ernist work ever made in Australia, the
near Olympic-pool-size "Snake," painted
by Sidney Nolan in the early nineteen-
seventies. Influenced by the Aboriginal
mythology of the Dreamtime, its sixteen
hundred and twenty panels, each a unique
image---a flower, a bird, a face---unite to
form a mammoth writhing rainbow ser-
pent. Walsh lives in an apartment above,
with windows in the floor through which
he can view this Australian masterpiece
every day. Whatever MONA is to others, it
is for David Walsh home.
At a Sydney art opening, Walsh was
approached by a man who asked,
"Aren t you the guy who built the great art
museum in Hobart?"
"No, mate," Walsh replied. "I sell
drugs in children s playgrounds."
"Oh, well," the man said. "It s better
than doing something bad like gambling."
Walsh is a leader of what Australian
newspapers describe as the world s big-
gest gambling syndicate, a group of sev-
enteen known as the Bank Roll. The
Bank Roll s other leader is Walsh s best
friend, Zeljko Ranogajec, a fellow-
Tasmanian who s been described by the
Web site Blackjack Insider as one of the
"most innovative" blackjack players of all
time. Frequently portrayed in the media
as the world s biggest gambler, Rano-
gajec is perhaps its most elusive. His
formidable partnership with Walsh can
be traced back over thirty years. "I d spot
the opportunities," Ranogajec, a gently
spoken and amiable man, told me by
phone from London, where he now
lives, "and David would do the maths.
He s intellectually gifted. Present him
with any problem or puzzle and in a few
hours he can solve it."
"Whenever he gets argumentative, I
ask him how far Venus is from the Sun,"
Kirsha Kaechele, Walsh s girlfriend of the
past two years and a self-described "life
artist," told me. "It always works. Num-
bers are very calming for David."
"Mathematics," Walsh has written, "is
unsullied and friendships are dirty." At
times, his belief in the wisdom of num-
bers approaches the mysticism of numer-
ologists. In his unpublished memoir, a
"fictional" chapter has a thinly disguised